Music in Irish Emigration Literature
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The University of Notre Dame Australia ResearchOnline@ND Theses 2017 Singing exile: Music in Irish emigration literature Christopher McCann The University of Notre Dame Australia Follow this and additional works at: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Publication Details McCann, C. (2017). Singing exile: Music in Irish emigration literature (Master of Arts (Thesis)). University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/166 This dissertation/thesis is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Singing Exile: Music in Irish Emigration Literature by Christopher McCann A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts (Research) at the University of Notre Dame Australia (Fremantle) June 2017 Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Revival Cultural Field and Exile: George Moore and James Joyce 13 Chapter Two: Traditional Music and the Post-Independence Exodus to Britain 43 Chapter Three: Between Two Worlds: Music at the American wake 66 Chapter Four: “Os comhair lán an tí”: Sean-nós as a site of memory in Brooklyn 93 Chapter Five: Imagined Geography and Communal Memory in Come Back to Erin 120 Conclusion 144 Appendix: Annotated Discography 150 Bibliography 158 ii Abstract Ireland possesses a cultural heritage that is particularly literary and musical. The island is also renowned for its extensive and ongoing history of emigration, and imagery of exile and return is as intrinsic to conceptions of Irishness as the island’s artistic lineage. The impact on the creation of a modern Irish identity by exilic Irish writers and musicians is testament to this relationship. The act of emigration can be conceived as a narrative of individual identity framed by a wider cultural discourse. It is therefore natural that the themes of exile and departure are a frequent presence in Irish art, especially literature and music. Literary expressions of the complex negotiation of self within culture that exile entails are enhanced by the connotative power of music. This thesis assesses the vital role music plays in framing shifts of identity within Irish emigration literature. Individual migration events occur alongside developing biographies of the self and the nation, and music provides crucial insight into the mechanisms of identity formation within social constructions of exile. This research analyses musical devices in the prose works of a series of Irish authors, focusing on the period between the commencement of the Gaelic Revival, circa 1880, and the middle of the twentieth century. Drawing on a variety of theoretical bases, including literature, geography, musicology, and history, it examines how musico-literary portrayals of emigration reflect and mediate the multiplicities inherent in narratives of exilic Irish identity. iii I, Christopher John McCann, certify that this thesis is entirely my own work and does not contain any material that has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other institution. To the best of my knowledge, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. Christopher John McCann _____________________________ iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my supervisors Angeline O’Neill and Chris Wortham, thank you for your wisdom and support over the course of this research and also the years past at the University of Notre Dame. To my mother Felicity and father Philip, thank you for your unconditional support, through the good and the hard times, and in the future. Go raibh maith agat a Lillis Ó Laoire, táim buíoch díot ar do chomhairle. Thank you for your ongoing advice and for your hospitality during my stays in Galway. Thanks also to others in Ireland who have helped me along the way— especially Luke Gibbons and Harry White for providing me with direction early in the process. Finally, thanks to Jackie Stevens for her assistance in setting up the accompanying audio archive, bringing alive the music within this thesis. v Introduction Ireland is renowned for its long cultural heritage of literature and music, as well as the breadth of its worldwide diaspora. Each of these has its place in the construction of a modern Irish identity, and in what it means to be Irish. Indeed, the only nation with a musical instrument as its national symbol has produced four Nobel laureates in literature, almost all of whom lived outside of Ireland for large portions of their lives. Six Irish authors also feature in the literary halls of fame of Britain or France.1 Indeed, aligning with John Dahlberg-Acton’s assessment that exile is the “nursery of nationality,” the Gaelic and Literary Revivals of circa 1880- 1920 that were crucial in revitalising nationalism in Ireland originally found impetus abroad. 2 The early momentum for the movements came from London, as influential nineteenth century exiles such as W.B. Yeats and W. P. Ryan “distilled the elements to make a modern Ireland” from an ancient literary and musical inheritance.3 Particularly since the Flight of the Earls in the early seventeenth century, imagery of exile and return has been as intrinsic to conceptions of Irishness as the island’s literary and musical lineage. In the period between 1801 and 1921, at least eight million people departed for North America, Great Britain and Australia, and more left Ireland between 1856 and 1921 than in the preceding two and a half centuries.4 In 2002, President Mary McAleese estimated a worldwide Irish diaspora of 70 million, a figure that will only rise in future generations.5 The heaviest periods of emigration have occurred during economic and humanitarian crises such as the Great Famine, but the persistence of emigration even during times of relative prosperity speaks of the pervasiveness of departure on the Irish cultural psyche. This relationship between exile and culture is more complex than it first appears. As Jacques Derrida asserts, “national rootedness … is rooted first of all in 1 R. V. Comerford, Ireland (London: Hodder Arnold, 2003), 180. 2 Benedict Anderson, “Exodus,” Critical Enquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 315. 3 Aidan Arrowsmith, “Photographic Memories: Nostalgia and Irish Diaspora Writing,” Textual Practice 19, no. 2 (2005): 298. 4 Enda Delaney, “Transnationalism, Networks and Emigration from Post-War Ireland,” Immigrants and Minorities 23, no. 2-3 (2005): 425; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 345. 5 Ann Schofield, “The Returned Yank as Site of Memory in Irish Popular Culture,” Journal of American Studies 47 (2013): 1178. 1 the memory or the anxiety of a displaced—or displaceable—population.”6 Artistic representations of Irishness in music and literature have both shaped and been shaped by the conditions of exile. For example, after the cultural Revival had rather dissipated in the early years of the Free State, proscriptions such as the Censorship of Publications Act 1929 (while not explicitly aimed at native literature) effectively ostracised a generation of Irish artists and writers who had concluded that “Ireland was no longer an interesting place to live.”7 Many writers chose exile rather than remaining in a censorious climate, and the development of Irish cultural consciousness that should have continued in a free Ireland was instead undertaken overseas in the “free zones of art.”8 This is, according to Declan Kiberd, an unsurprising phenomenon: “to write—as to read—is to enter a sort of exile from the world. But to go into exile … may well be a signal to write.”9 James Joyce is the paradigm in this regard. For him, exile was a “strategy of combat” closely connected with the act of writing: In later life Joyce told his friend Claude Sykes that, so long as he could write, he could live anywhere, in a tub, like Diogenes. Writing was itself a form of exile for him, a source of detachment . Only in writing, which is also departing, is it possible to achieve the purification which comes from continual rebaptism of the mind.10 The concept of “rebaptism” aptly describes the constant renewal of Irish collective identity in each individual act of exile. Physical departure from home prompts a spiritual reevaluation of one’s own placement within the wider discourse of preexisting cultural narratives. The terms used to describe Irish emigration reflect this interrelation: in 1990 the Irish President Mary Robinson called Ireland’s history of emigration a “great narrative of dispossession and belonging,” and added that it had become “one of the 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 83. 7 Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The literature of the modern nation (London: Vintage, 1996), 264. 8 Ibid., 266. 9 Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 10 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 114. 2 treasures of our society.”11 Similarly, author John Banville opined that the “violent poetry of leave-taking is ingrained in the Irish consciousness.”12 These inherently literary conceptions of exilic nationalism are supported by concurrent musical representations. Kerby Miller extensively catalogues the musical and literary expression of attachment to native place through generations of Irish-American communities.